After having bought Oriental Lady in the Caribbean in
May of 1981, Sue and I were seriously out of money. We'd been
on
the road for 16 months and were surviving on cash advances on our credit cards.
So we anchored Lady in Rodney Lagoon,
St. Lucia,
and flew back to California to work.

While home, we also researched and bought lots of
bits for our new boat: Solar panels, VHF and SSB radios and their antenna
systems, new fridge components, an electric anchor winch, lights, a stereo
system, etc., etc. To get all this stuff (and ourselves) back down to
St. Lucia
cheaply, we contacted the parent company of the charter outfit in
Rodney Lagoon - Steven's Yachts, in Annapolis. Yes, they had an S&S 47'
cutter named Skyline that needed delivering about when we wanted to go
down, and yes, we could crew on her and take as much stuff as would fit on the
boat. But they wanted a real, bona-fide delivery captain as skipper.
We didn't find out why until later.
But the deal was fine with us, as it saved us several thousand (1982) dollars.

The skipper was nice enough, if a bit of a cocaine
addict. He gave us the nice, big, aft master cabin, and most of our gear
fit in there as well, out of other people's way. He had a 100-ton license,
and apparently made his living driving tugboats. He certainly didn't make
his living sailing, as I'm not sure he knew how.

After getting the briefing from Steven's Yachts
(which I tagged along for) we set off from Annapolis, down the Chesapeake bay.
Several hours later found us becalmed, in fog, in the shipping channel - without
any diesel. Apparently, Skyline's fuel tanks had not been filled
beforehand. After spending the entire day listening for other boats and
being sure we were about to be run down, the Coast Guard nicely came out and
towed us into Norfolk, VA (they don't do this anymore).
Their "safety inspection" discovered the hose
that should have gone to the (non-existent) toilet holding-tanks. The
skipper and I, knowing that these tanks had been illegally left off on purpose,
looked at each other for a moment and then assured the Coast Guard that we'd
look into it.

All the water that pours into the Caribbean from the
Atlantic has to escape somehow, and it does so by squirting past Florida and up
the eastern seaboard of the US, forming the Gulf-Stream. The winds often
run counter to this huge "river" of warm water, setting up difficult,
square-sided seas. As we were sailing across this one night, all wrapped
up in as many waterproof layers as we could, Sue suddenly noticed the steering
go slack. We were pounding along in the middle of the night, in ugly
conditions, in a boat we could no longer steer. Luckily, the briefing had
included the location of the emergency tiller, so we dug that out, set it up,
and set our course for Bermuda to effect repairs. This was actually OK
with us, as
we'd never been there. Then the engineer in me had to take the steering
pedestal apart the next morning and fix the silly steering, thereby robbing
myself of a paid vacation in Bermuda. Sometimes my own stupidity amazes
me...

The rest of the passage was uneventful, except that
we motored the whole way and had to put into
Antigua just to get some more fuel.
Our gear for Oriental Lady should not have had to pay duty in
St. Lucia,
but the customs agents at that time tended towards tin-gods.
One we called Mr. "Yes-sir" Patrick, as it was necessary to listen to his
socialist blatherings, saying nothing more than "Yes, sir" at appropriate
intervals, until he ran down enough to complete our paperwork. He was very
proud of the fact that he had a desk job, and he grew his little
finger-nail about 2" long and painted it in red and white stripes so that
everyone else would know it as well. Given this, we decided that what they didn't
know wouldn't harm anyone. We slowed down and arrived after dark,
transferring our gear after they'd gone home, and then cleared in officially the
next morning.

It was only after we got down to
St. Lucia that we
discovered the rest of the story
about Skyline. It seems
that she was the replacement for a previous boat, also an S&S 47',
but the story was so incredible that the insurers hadn't wanted to pay out...

The original boat had
been fitted out in Annapolis and been ready for delivery to Steven's Yachts in
St. Lucia
in February. Now, most delivery skippers know better than to sail out of
the Chesapeake then, so there was a bit of a problem finding someone to deliver
the boat down to the Caribbean.
So when a guy stepped forward and said he'd take her down, nobody asked many
questions. (His references later turned out to be more bar-room type
references than sailing references.)

That skipper quickly put together an inexperienced
crew consisting of another guy and 2 women. The 4 of them set off down the
Chesapeake and out into the Atlantic. Somewhat predictably, when they
reached the Gulf Stream just offshore, with its wind-against-current and
square-sided waves, they were way out of their element. To
his credit, the skipper realized this and decided to head for Bermuda for
(presumably) more instruction. So they dug out the radio-direction finder
(RDF), found the Bermuda beacon, and headed east.

They continued sailing east for several days,
following the radio beacon. More and more days. GPS hadn't been
invented yet, and the boat carried no other form of electronic navigational aid.
It's unclear if the skipper even had (or knew how to use) a sextant. After
much longer than they thought reasonable, they finally saw a freighter. So
they called it on the VHF radio and asked for their position. They were
told they were just off the Azores, hundreds of miles past Bermuda and, in fact,
most of the way across the Atlantic!

How could this be? They'd followed the Bermuda
RDF beacon!

The answer lies in how an RDF works. It's
basically a cheap AM radio with a ferrite bar antenna. You look up Bermuda
in the signal book, dial in the frequency, listen to the signal to make sure
it's the correct one, and then swing the RDF to find which direction the signal
goes away - that is the direction of the beacon. (It's much easier
to find the minimum signal than the maximum signal.) The problem is that
there's some ambiguity. The beacon is either directly in front of you, or
... directly behind. It seems that our nit-wit skipper had sailed past
Bermuda in the night, passed the beacon without noticing, and they'd then been
sailing away from Bermuda for several days.

When the freighter gave them their location, the
second guy on board decides that this is too much, and he is going to take over
control of the boat. But first he decides to climb onto the freighter to
get some advise. After he does so, the 2 women look at each other,
proclaim that they don't want to be left alone with the nit-wit skipper, and
they also get onto the freighter. The skipper then decides that he doesn't
want to be left alone and he also gets onto the freighter, leaving nobody on the
yacht.

The decision is then made that the freighter will tow
the yacht into the Azores. So they put a big rope around the yacht's
anchor winch, throw a bunch more rope into the water (don't want to have the
yacht too close behind), and the order is given to get underway. But the
slack from the big rope gets caught in the propeller's back-wash, and the yacht
is reeled in like a giant fish on a powered winch, only to smash into the back
of the freighter! They quickly take the freighter out of gear, unwind the
rope as best they can, and try again - with exactly the same results. I'm
not making this up! The way the story was told to me, they did this some
7 times before the front of the yacht crushed, fell off, and the
poor yacht sank. (No wonder the insurers didn't want to pay!)